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One of the world's most distinguished art historians last fortnight published the year's soundest, handsomest, most massive (eight and a half pounds) art book. The historian is 51-year-old German-born Erwin Panofsky, of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J. The book is Albrecht Duerer (Princeton University Press; $20), a two-volume analytical study of Germany's great post-medieval engraver, painter, art theorist. It is the most useful and enlightening Duerer monograph yet to appear.

Historian Panofsky has studied Duerer ever since his German student days, has worked on this book for the last two years. The present Duerer volumes are addressed to art lovers rather than to art scholars. But Albrecht Duerer is not a "popular" book: it is a painstaking development of the intricately erudite lectures delivered by its author at Northwestern University in 1938.

The large, tastefully designed Panofsky Duerer contains 282 pages of text (Vol. I), 149 pages of beautifully printed collotype plates reproducing many of the known examples of Duerer's work (Vol. II).

Personable, witty Erwin Panofsky came to the U.S. from Germany in 1934. At the University of Hamburg he taught art history, made an international reputation as top-rank specialist in several branches of his subject (notably medieval German sculpture, Duerer, Michelangelo, the Italian Baroque). From visiting professorships at New York University and Princeton, he went to the recently established (1933) Institute for Advanced Study.

Panofsky hobbies: dogs, movies. Panofsky was an ardent cinemaddict long before it became fashionable for intellectuals to take movies seriously, wrote learned papers about films for the Princeton art and archaeology department Bulletin, and the defunct, advance-guard expatriate quarterly transition. For a rest after completing his monumental job on Duerer, Panofsky retired to his Kennebunkport retreat, where he spends much time with his friend and neighbor, Art Collector Booth Tarkington.

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